Is Twitter Stealing Our Link Juice?
-
Something recently clicked in my mind when looking at the way our web developers were linking to our twitter accounts:.
They were linking like this: A) https://twitter.com/#!/aczarto
Instead of like this: B) https://twitter.com/aczarto
(Due to a copy/paste from the address bar).Technically (A) is a link to the homepage of twitter and NOT to the individual twitter account as in **(B) **(The hash tag isn't technically part of the url, and traditionally Google has ignored everything after the hashtag)
For me, this raises a few thoughts/comments:
- Make sure your web team is linking in (B) format and not just copy pasting the url when they visit your company's twitter page.
- I don't think twitter is doing this on purpose - but if they are - it is EVIL GENIUS! They are stealing lots of links heading into a user's account page and instead sending that link juice to their home page.
- Does Google-bot follow hash tags? ie: When Google hits the link (A), does it crawl twitter.com/ or does it crawl twitter.com/#!/aczarto?
- Is this a tactic that can be leveraged by others to try and direct links to other pages? ie: MyWebStore.com/money-page/#show-link-bait that generates shares that actually produce links to the site's money page instead of the intended link-bait.
- Could this be possibly considered cloaking?
Looking forward to people's thoughts...
-
I don't think so. Twitter helps a lot to get social signals for pages. I did this for my page of horse that hosted on WordPress.
-
Very cool. I've added a screen shot just in case the SERPs change at a later date.
-
lol....no it was not intentional....:)
without.....but when you click on them both are listed with the #!.
Yesterday for some reason my twitter account rankings went through the roof and I am ranked for many keywords for my twitter account now. I am not sure what happened but am very happy about it.
-
Could you provide a link to the SERP or a screenshot? I only see the non-hashtag version:
Also, the links you provided above link to the @OrthoJobs twitter account -- Is that intentional?
-
both of mine are listed on twitter. for example. @ horsebuggy shows up as
-
Horse Buggy
<cite>twitter.com/horsebuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to follow Horse Buggy (@_HorseBuggy_). Horse Buggy is the Leading provider of**...**
-
<cite>https://twitter.com/#!/HorseBuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to followk HorseBuggy.net (@_HorseBuggy_). Leading provider of Horse Buggies.....
-
-
Figured out the answers from this SERP:
Notice how the SEER Interactive twitter account is listed like this: https://twitter.com/#!/seerinteractive (likely because that's how they link to it from their homepage: http://www.seerinteractive.com/)
And not like this: https://twitter.com/seerinteractiveSo the answers to the questions above are:
- It doesn't matter which format you use as Google understands that this is a special case URL, and will include the hashtag in the spidered URL. But, you may still have canonical link issues and splitting of link juice.
- Link juice is going to your twitter account page regardless of how you link. Twitter is not stealing link juice to it's homepage.
- Google has a special case for Twitter - With twitter URLS, Google will consider the hashtag to be part of the URL.
- This tactic could be leveraged by others, but it would be considered cloaking. It is not cloaking in Twitter's case, as Google recognizes the URL as a unique url.
Hope someone found this interesting. (I did!)
Alex
-
I put my twitter url on a directory and it was not working...so they changed it.
They sent me the following message.
The following changes have been made:
** Twitter Id changing from http://twitter.com/widget to http://twitter.com/#!/widget
Should I have them change it to something else?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Twitter hashtag tending?
A Twitter hashtag #MufflerMan is trending worldwide and that too since last 8-10 days. How is it possible for a hashtag to rend for so long?
Social Media | | IM_Learner0 -
Sharing images on twitter
Hi, I want to start sharing images on Twitter, because our industry regulator (FCA) suggests it's possible to share more info about complicated financial products (we are a mortgage broker) where you can't get all the detail needed in 140 characters to be 'clear, fair and not misleading'... I have been thinking about putting mortgage info in images to be shared, but the problem I can foresee is if the rate gets withdrawn by the lender, and the image is already out there (hopefully being shared), it's still our responsibility (according to the FCA guidelines anyway), and we'd be misleading people (unintentionally, but still...) ... It's all a bit of a minefield! So... If the image is hosted on our server and we just change the content of the image but not its file name, location etc... it should update, right? BUT is this even possible? As far as I can tell Twitter only lets you upload an image for sharing (so the image is displayed) and doesn't display images you're hosting... If anyone can tell me how to do this I'd be very grateful... If it's not possible, please also let me know 🙂 Thanks! Amelia
Social Media | | CommT0 -
Webmaster is showing hundreds of external links from 1 G+ post
A page on our site is registering as having 262 external links coming from two pages on Google+. The page it comes from is for posts related to #weddings, but I can't find the post with our link. Has anyone else experienced this? Linking page https://plus.google.com/app/basic/s/%23Wedding/related?cbp=17npa447ckmq3&sview=27&cid=5&soc-app=115&soc-platform=1&sri=0&spath=/app/basic/100121179959444544221/posts&sparm=cbp%3D16tcwubxsznm%26sview%3D27%26cid%3D5%26soc-app%3D115%26soc-platform%3D1%26stct%3DCAIQgJf0-fbDugIgCigB%26spath%3D/app/basic/stream%26sparm%3Dcbp%253Dm5w9s8yrkyhx%2526sview%253D27%2526cid%253D5%2526soc-app%253D115%2526soc-platform%253D1
Social Media | | HireSpace0 -
Social data for links
Hey can anyone recommend a tools out there, which can look at a list of urls (over 20+) and it will show the social stats for each url (e.g. number of Facebook Shares, Tweets, etc)? Or a tool which searchers within a certain category or niche (might be based on the keyword you entered), and finds the most shared content? Cheers, Chris
Social Media | | MBASydney0 -
Personal & Business Google+ Pages - which gives SEO juice?
Hi i set up a personal Google+ page and added a business page for my website www.over50choices.co.uk. The business page is linked to my site, but my personal profile "James Price" has the authorship and my blog, youtube, twitter accounts for over50choices linked to it - do i need to link all these accounts to my Google+ business page to get maximum SEO juice or will my personal page get picked up? Do i need to transfer all the social accounts to my business profille - help!? Thanks James
Social Media | | AshShep11 -
How do you generate followers on twitter?
Hi, How do you generate followers on twitter? I see a lot of people are saying follow others to gain more followers, use #tags and engage with other peoples tweets. But with the last point, all the tweets I find under search are spam. As an example, if you searched 'SEO' all you are going to get is lots of ' view this article' type tweets. It's almost like there is more business/spam then actual real people. Cheers
Social Media | | activitysuper0 -
What are the strategies in Link Building? How to increase referral traffic?
Guys please help me to increase reference traffic for a dry topic website such as automotives, insurance, real estate. I tried social bookmarking and networking but I did not find any difference I even did Blog commenting forum posting but it did not make much difference to me It increased my search rate but it not helped in my referral traffic. So please suggest me better strategies in Link Building for dry topic websites
Social Media | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Buying Twitter/Facebook Followers
So i have a client that sends me a link once a week about buying followers for social media profiles. Each time i tell him if it seems to good to be true... then its too good to be true! What are your guys thoughts, experiences, feelings? Here are a few examples: http://www.targetedtraffic.int.tc http://www.fbfandamonium.com
Social Media | | kchandler0